On SAGE Insight: Special issue: Reading in the Age of the Internet

Reading has changed with consumer adoption of digital technologies, and its changes are many: from the new ways in which users of such technologies can now access texts to the opportunities those users now have for discussing them online. Given technological developments, changes in behavior may seem inevitably. How researchers, particularly those interested in the interaction of readers with texts and of readers with one another around texts, can uncover, describe, and analyzes these changes is an important emerging topic.

The articles in this special issue attempt to offer methods for investigating how the internet and associated technologies affect reading. They have been specially selected to cover a wide range of online interpretative practices and to showcase methodologies arising from research traditions that have had too little exposure within forms of literary study organised around the enactment, rather than the empirical analysis, of reading and interpretation. In particular, this special issue looks at how readers, reproduce, appropriate, and subvert traditional practices for reading and interpreting texts in online environments.